Answer:
Plato's Theory of forms.
Explanation:
At the time of Plato, young people were educated through the Homeric epics. They listened to them every day and extracted from them parameters of conduct, notions of honor, nobility, beauty and kindness. Acting on the affective, cognitive and behavioral levels, the arts were to serve certain social functions. Contrary to modern thinking, pleasure and beauty as ends in themselves were insufficient criteria. It made no sense to contemplate a work just for the beauty of its forms.
If Plato expels the poets from the ideal city, it is because he is interested in the "ethical-political" purposes of the arts. Poetry, in its broadest sense, represents men in action. And in representing them engenders empathy, that peculiar feeling that makes us feel the emotion of the other. Empathy itself is morally neutral, but it becomes desirable or reckless according to the characters we are led to identify with. Thus, when imitated men exhibit reprehensible behavior (such as Oedipus, Medea, Menelaus, Helen, and even Achilles, with their rampant hatred), she induces the viewer to bad thoughts. The crimes, disputes, rapes and betrayals of the Olympian gods provide, from the philosopher's point of view, sad models.
